The Leading Oil Company Learns about ASU Promising Projects

Astrakhan State University was visited by representatives of the company «LUKOIL-Nizhnevolzhskneft». They learnt about the university educational and research facilities and are ready to make out a plan of joint work in different areas.

During the tour around the university laboratories and a round-table discussion, the parties determined spheres of potential cooperation:

«It is very important for us to establish permanent partner relations with regional companies,» Rector Markelov says, «The University can help them as an academic institution. We are also ready to get orders from you and modify our focus areas, starting from advanced training of employees to research projects that may be interesting for you».

In particular, the guests had a look at the university robotic products: Nikolay Svishchev, an MA student, demonstrated functional capabilities of his submersible robot, and Ivan Mikhaylov, the Head of the Robotics Centre, presented, among others, a defectoscope crawler, a self-propelled vehicle for pipeline survey.

Aleksey Kazakov, the First Deputy Director-General and the company chief engineer, stressed that now robotics is being actively introduced in all the spheres worldwide, and this research area is very important and promising.

The guests also took interest in prospects of cooperation with the Caspian Higher School of Interpreting and Translation, one of the best linguistic schools in Russia. MA students and trainers of the School are eager to provide linguistic services at LUKOIL events in 15 foreign languages; besides, the School lecture rooms are equipped with high-standard facilities, which allows to host important meetings at our university. Olga Egorova, the School Director, stressed that ASU experts are competent in technical translation and interpreting, which directly meets the interests of the company.

The round-table discussion brought together representatives of different research areas covered at the university — from IT to archeology. They presented their projects that may be of interest for the guests in the long term.

«LUKOIL-Nizhnevolzhskneft» is also ready to help the university in training. «Of course, we lack for this cooperation, and we’ll be glad to share what we have and show our best practices», stressed Aleksey Kazakov.

For now, the parties have agreed to create project groups on promising areas of cooperation and to make out a plan of immediate actions. In the near future, a university delegation is expected to visit the company facilities, including the Filanovsky oil field in the Caspian Sea.